In Douglas Adams’s hilarious book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of deep thought, it spits out a clear, but ultimately meaningless, answer: 42. Although the book’s fans have tried to ascribe some symbolic meaning to this number, I think there is none. Adams was simply mocking how humans crave and cling to certainty.
